Did 'Writers' get it wrong?

The portrayal of a Long Beach high school in 'Freedom Writers' raises hackles in the city. The teacher who inspired the film speaks up for it.

Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach is one of the school district's jewels. Situated near million-dollar homes, it's considered a "learning academy" where uniformed students study classics and others vie to make its waiting list.

But in the new Hilary Swank film "Freedom Writers," that same school is portrayed as a beaten-down inner-city nightmare, run by bitter burned-out teachers and populated with well-armed students.

"Anybody who knows Long Beach knows the high school is nothing like that," said Long Beach Unified School District Supt. Chris Steinhauser.

Despite that, Steinhauser considered the film uplifting. But other Long Beach residents -- like the subjects of other true-life stories -- are appalled at the Hollywood version. They aren't happy with its portrayal of the true story of Long Beach teacher Erin Gruwell and her at-risk students, saying it offers an oversimplified, insulting narrative about the community: poor racial minorities triumph over lazy, jealous teachers and The Man.

The Freedom Writers -- Gruwell's 150 students who named themselves for the civil rights group -- included Caucasian and middle-class students, the critics point out. One was the popular football quarterback. Wilson High's students also came from affluent Eastside neighborhoods with waterfront mansions, and plenty of teachers at the high school helped Gruwell and her cause.

Gruwell and writer-director Richard LaGravenese stand by the film, which opened Friday to a modest $9.7 million. They spent six years crafting the screenplay, with Gruwell and her students guiding LaGravenese's drafts. Much of it was taken directly from "The Freedom Writers Diaries," a collection of excerpts from the students' journals that offers an often wrenching account of their home lives.

Gruwell and LaGravenese stress that the movie takes place from 1993 to 1998, when Long Beach and Wilson High were much tougher than they are today. Gruwell says her classes were as they appear in the film: predominantly made up of African Americans, Latinos and Asians. The white, middle-class students, Gruwell says, only joined after word spread of her teaching methods. As for the gritty look of the film, Gruwell says that the classroom in the movie is an exact replica and that filming couldn't take place at Wilson because the school district demanded too high a location fee from Paramount Pictures. Two L.A. schools -- Hamilton and University high schools in West Los Angeles -- were used instead. (Paramount declined to comment.)

"People who are making comments don't know the true story," Gruwell said. "When you take a subject matter of intolerance, we had to look at every single angle of a story to bring it to life. When it comes to complexities of race, people need to talk about the fact that this is an enormous city that has been compartmentalized."

The controversy comes at a particularly sensitive time for locals. Long Beach is one of the most diverse cities in America, with the third largest school district in the state and a community of both great wealth and extreme poverty. Ten African American teenagers are now on trial for the brutal Halloween night attack in affluent Bixby Knolls of three white women, an incident police are calling a hate crime.

The city has worked hard to distance itself from the image popularized in the songs of rap artist Snoop Dogg, such as the gang-banging, drug-infested "LBC." "Freedom Writers," they say, will only recast the community as dangerous.

"We're not in Wyoming," said Wilson High School parent and alum Ben Goldberg. "But we're not in Watts, either."

"Judging from the film, you'd think that no teacher had ever tried this," wrote Long Beach Press-Telegram film critic Glenn Whipp on Friday. "Worse, you'd guess that apart from the noble Gruwell, no other teacher cares.... Gruwell's work is noteworthy, but it is by no means unusual, despite the film's cartoon-like portrayals of her bitter, envious and, in one case, racist colleagues."

Whatever qualms Long Beach residents may have about the movie, they turned out en masse to see it last weekend, giving the city the largest turnout in the country. At a local showing that Gruwell and some of her Freedom Writers attended, Gruwell said that audience members asked for autographs from her students. The website for her nonprofit, FreedomWriters Foundation.org, meanwhile, got 29,000 hits after the film's release, a significant increase.

"Freedom Writers" details the well-publicized success of Gruwell, who as a student teacher inspired her racially diverse classes to bond as a family, commit themselves to their education and, most famously, publish their diary excerpts, which they did, to wide acclaim.